MARC MUNROE DION: We should take the quiet as it comes

A month after the Boston Marathon bombing, it’s quiet and I’m writing. I don’t mean it’s quiet in the newsroom, though it is, at least this morning. But even when it’s quiet, a newsroom gives up the sound of typing, high heels clacking across the linoleum floor, the police...

A month after the Boston Marathon bombing, it’s quiet and I’m writing.

I don’t mean it’s quiet in the newsroom, though it is, at least this morning. But even when it’s quiet, a newsroom gives up the sound of typing, high heels clacking across the linoleum floor, the police scanner’s fuzzy screech.

It’s quiet all over Fall River, quiet like it always is, maybe a little construction noise here and there, a car horn, a siren, the gentle buzz of citizens grumbling about unemployment or trash pickup.

A month or so ago, it was considerably more exciting. Fall River people were in Boston when the bomb exploded. The story slopped over onto the campus of the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, normally a place of middle- and working-class striving.

The big world came to Fall River, as it seldom does in that way.

Most often, the big world comes here in the form of immigrants, narcotics and military service.

You hire a roofing crew and they show up happily speaking some language you can’t speak and they put a new roof on your house and they leave.

The guy who sells you your cigarettes speaks some swift, guttural tongue into his cellphone while he rings you up.

And the drugs come from everywhere.

In Fall River, we grunt and sweat about getting tourists to come here from Indiana.

Meanwhile, marijuana makes its way here from Mexico. Cocaine is imported from Colombia, thousands of miles away. In an Afghan valley, a farmer cultivates the poppy that will be cooked into heroin, smuggled halfway across the world and shot into a vein on Palmer Street, proof that pure capitalism finds (or makes) a market.

Our sons and daughters, once they put on a uniform, are likely to end up anywhere, from the pockmarked hills of Afghanistan to the demilitarized zone in Korea. They bring the world home with them when they come back on leave. Sometimes, the big world sends them back in a coffin.

That Boston bombing story isn’t over, not yet. The UMass Dartmouth end of it isn’t over, either. “An investigation continues,” as the newspapers say.

A couple days after 9/11, in a Fall River bar, I deposited myself on a stool and started talking to the guy next to me about the attack in New York.

“Every now and then, it’s a comfort to live in a hick town,” I told the guy.

I said that for months. I may even have written it in this column.

It was a nice, safe thing to believe. I felt better when I said it, too. But I believe it less now.

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Not that I think some fellow from a country I can’t find on a map is likely to set off a bomb that will kill me as I walk to the bank on my lunch hour.

But it seems more possible than it did a month ago.

Thinking about stuff like this is supposed to be “letting the terrorists win,” but no matter how many flag decals you put on your car bumper, you’re gonna feel a little less safe. This is true even if, in Fall River, I’ve got a better chance of being killed by a heroin addict trying to rob me than I do of being blown up in any kind of terror attack.

I’m used to taking that chance, walking from my truck to my house after a night shift, stepping out of a saloon at midnight.

I turned 56 on May 10. It’s a bad age to take chances, a good age for a nap.

But, like a doctor friend of mine used to say, “You can’t look at life through a microscope.”